Plantar Warts

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Warts are caused by the human papillomavirus and they can occur anywhere on the body. There are 10 varieties of warts and as many as 130 varieties of papillomavirus. Many people get warts  as children (mainly simple warts) and lose them inexplicably as they approach puberty. Genital warts on the other hand are thankfully rare in children and are passed on through sexual contact between adults.

Plantar warts occur on the sole of your foot and the underside of your toes and they can be a real nuisance, they can be a type of mosaic clustered wart or a simple single wart. If you firmly press a wart anywhere on your body it would feel uncomfortable and therein lies the problem with plantar warts, everytime you stand up there is firm pressure on them.

Fortunately there are a variety of off -the- shelf products that are reasonably cheap and highly effective against plantar warts, if you or your children get them you should use these products as soon as you can because the wart can progressively get bigger and more painful if you leave them be.

There is another problem with plantar warts too, they can affect the way you walk, stand and run. This happens because you move your feet and stand in a way that removes pressure from that part of your foot so you can avoid pain. This may cause inflammation to another part of your foot sole through over use and even make you prone to twisting your ankle because of how it effects your stride.

This was all brought home to me recently when my daughter kept twisting her ankle when she played sport. A plantar wart under her right big toe that had previously been unsuccessfully treated got bigger and the bigger it got the more she turned her left ankle.

Sometimes larger warts take more than one treatment so that is what we did (always use products according to manufacturers advice) and for several weeks now she has not twisted her ankle again.

Now that you know what the secondary effects of plantar warts can be you can avoid them through promptly treating them but when you don’t know you may not be able to see the cause and effect and it can make other things worse like your ankles. It is an example of the compensatory effect in action, just like a sore knee can cause back pain and a sore shoulder can give you neck pain.

Sometimes adults can baulk at getting them “burnt off” by the doctor because burning sounds painful but this does not need to be the case. The product that I used on my daughter’s foot caused her no distress atall, it was a cold spray applied with a cotton bud, other off the shelf wart treatments come in the form of ointments that are shielded from the surrounding healthy skin by barrier dressings. The sprays seem to be more effective on larger warts but the ointments work on smaller plantar warts quite well. Warts can recur, if they do you treat then again.

Arthritis and Diet

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There are many in the alternate medicine community who advocate diet therapy for the treatment of arthritis, two of the best known ones are the alkaline diet and the nightshade -free diet. Orthodox medicine for the most part considers these therapies at best ineffective and at worst quackery. Fortunately you can safely try these therapies for yourself and see if they work as well for you as others have claimed they have for themselves.

The alkaline and nightshade-free diets may or may not work for you but pharmacuetical medications may not either and best of all you can do both if you like.

The alkaline diet as it’s name suggests, is aimed at lowering the body’s acidity, the rationale is that the body becomes more acidic when there is inflammation in it.

The nightshade -free diet is about eliminating foods in the solanaceae (nightshade) family because people with sensitivities or allergies to them are, it is claimed, more likely to get an inflammatory response when they eat them. Nightshade crops include capsicum, egg plant, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes and tamarilloes.

It is important that with either diet you are not lacking essential vitamins and minerals, for instance if you love tomatoes and normally you get most of your vitamin C from them and then eliminate tomatoes  from your diet,  you must get your vitamin C from elsewhere. This does not mean that you have to stock up on expensive suppliments,  just choose a healthy balance from the foods that you can have.

If you are going to find out if a dietary approach to your arthritis is going to work or not, being consistent is important and so is trying it long enough to show some results. If it makes you feel worse stop it.

If you are on pharmaceutical medication don’t mix it with herbal medication without consulting a pharmacist as they can react with one another, elimination diets and medicines should not be confused with one another.

There is nothing wrong with doing your own research by reading and listening to different ideas and opinions, the quality of online information is improving all the time because the demand for self-help knowledge is there. The popularity of cooking shows and the plethora of cook books now available shows that people want to eat real wholesome food- not many diets, recommend processed foods including those listed above.

Unfortunately arthritic conditions can recur, the older you get the more things break down and your body become less tolerant to mistreatment. Whether it is rheumatiod or psoriatic arthritis, PMR, fibromyalgia or some other auto immune condition causing your inflammation learn all you can about it once you get it properly diagnosed.

You wouldn’t put kerosene into your car so please show your stomach some respect and eat well.

Arthritis II

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Osteo Arthritis (OA) was the main subject of September’s post about arthritis, today other causes of arthritic pain will be looked at. Auto immune diseases such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Systemic Lupine Erythromatosis (SLE or Lupus), Polymyalgia Rheumatica (PMR) and Fibromyalgia (Fm) are some of the more commonly known of which.

Auto immune disease sees the body’s own defenses attack the body’s own healthy tissue, there are slightly more than eighty of them, nobody knows why they occur or how to cure or prevent them. The whole focus of treatment for auto immune disease is to manage the symptoms, in Western Medicine (WM) this is  done with anti-inflammatory drugs such as cortico steroids whilst in alternate medicine the use of diet and soft tissue therapies are more common place though anti-inflammatory herbs and mineral suppliments are also employed.

Auto immune diseases tend to be episodic in nature and they can start with quite vague symptoms such as a persistent low grade fever, fatigue, irritability, joint and muscle pain, weakness and lowered resistance to infections and allergies. The next stage  of symptoms onset of auto immune diseases can be intense and have you fearing the worst. PMR for instance can make your shoulders very stiff and sore very quickly, it affects people (mainly women) in the 50+ age group.

Auto immune diseases that produce arthritic symptoms can affect other tissues also, Lupus can inflame your skin and produce digestive problems, RA can weaken your heart and Fm (fibromyalgia) often will manifest with chronic fatigue symptoms alongside the stiff muscle and joint sensations. Self diagnosis is futile, if you get your problems properly diagnosed to begin with you can get help much faster.

Even if you get  very satisfactory relief from the medications you take there are other forms of treatment that can improve the management of your auto immune arthritis. Your ability and desire to exercise can be really tested with getting diseases like PMR and fibromyalgia, for months you may only be able to do gentle “nana exercises”, for a previously fit and strong person this can be truly demoralising, keeping your morale up can become a big issue in itself.

If you are a person who is quite happy to avoid exercise arthritis might be a tempting excuse to avoid it altogether but it is important to stay as physically active as your symptoms will allow you too because of all the benefits exercise gives you. Your circulation, posture, lung capacity and even your digestion benefit along with your muscles and joints when you exercise.

Getting expert advice on how you should exercise when you have strong arthritic symptoms is important, there will be activities that normally are no problem for you that become impossible and even embarrassing when your arthritis is acute, like a chameleon we must mentally adapt when things like this happen. Massage, chiropractic and osteopathy can all help you exercise more efficiently.

I have met several people over the years who have found low acid diets to be effective in combatting the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, if you want to go down this path figure out a plan with a nutritionist so you don’t miss out on any important nutrients when you adjust your diet.

Occupational Health

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It is relatively easier to spot potential safety hazards in a place like a building site than say a shopping centre for instance. On a construction site you might be hit by a falling object, become a falling object yourself, get injured by malfunctioning equipment,  have years of breathing in demolition dust or have something non-lethal like industrial deafness. Many die and are seriously injured every year in construction accidents.

The truth is that potential occupational health and safety hazards exist in all work places. Take sick -building- syndrome (SBS) for instance, a big part of SBS is inefficient and contaminated air conditioning systems, after about 20 years they  become very difficult if not impossible to keep bacteria and virus free. Buildings are literally constructed around air conditioning systems, to fully replace such a system can be enormously expensive which can make it completely impractical even if it is possible.

The main air con shafts that movie stars crawl through in action flicks divide into many narrower ribbed ducted tributaries that service smaller spaces- quite impossible to get in there and clean. Nowhere is this more serious than in our hospitals, infection control gets progressively more difficult mainly for this reason. Health ministers are either averse to publicly acknowledge this or more worryingly, they might not even know.

How many of us work in air conditioned buildings?

Some OH&S statistics are quite shocking and surprising, did you know nurses are more likely to get assaulted than police in their place of work?, particularly in casualty units on Friday and Saturday nights by drunk patients. Then their are stress issues affecting your health at work, during the implementation phase of the GST workers at the Taxation Office took record levels of stress leave because of the changes. More soldiers have died from suicide after returning from Afghanistan than who actually died in the field fighting because of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Occupational health and safety hazards take many forms.

I ponderered on numerous occassions what the healthiest occupation might be and I thought that being a Yoga teacher would go close, doing Yoga all day- what could be healthier than that? I thought that right up until I treated a Yoga teacher who told me that the yoga was fine but going around to each student trying to correct their technique was often quite difficult because of the awkward postures she would often find herself in doing this, especially in beginners classes.

If you do any job long enough and apply yourself to it, in some way it can undermine your health.

We have come a long way since child miners died of black lung and asbestos workers were expected to toil without protective gear but our new jobs have new OH&S challenges and we cannot rely on the workers compensation system to protect our interests like we used to. Changes to the Work Cover act several years ago has made compensation for work place injury and illness much harder than it once was, we really do have to take care of ourselves in the work place.

Iron Overload

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About 1 in every 300-400 people of white Northern European ancestry (one in 600-800 in coloured populations)  suffer from a hereditory disease that can dangerously store up too much iron in your body, it is called haemachromatosis (pronounced: he-ma-crow-ma-toe-sis) or Iron Overload (I.O.). It is kind of like the opposite of anaemia where you have too little iron in your body though strangely enough they do share some similar symptoms such as lethargy and weakness.

Even though only about 1 in 300 people get it I.O., one in 7 carry the gene  making it one of the most common hereditory diseases. When you have I.O. too much iron is absorbed from your diet and gets stored mainly in your liver and your joints,  unfortunately your body can’t squirt it out when it gets too much and left untreated it can make you sick and shorten your life.

This is a great shame because when it is detected early it is easy to fix, you don’t even need drugs or surgery. One of the big problems is getting I.O. diagnosed in the first place, it effects men earlier than women (30 to 60 years) and it shares many symptoms with other diseases, apart from lethargy these may include abdominal pain, arthritis (especially in the first two fingers), hair loss, forgetfulness, jaundice, mood swings and extreme irritability.

I.O. left untreated can give you liver cirrosis, impotence, diabetes and heart disease, it can be misdiagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia even though it is really simple to confirm with a blood test.

Your liver can be a very robust organ but when it’s had enough you can find out very suddenly and dramatically, when you have I.O. this might come about after a big boozy night that can give you the mother of all hang overs.( Alcohol does not mix well with I.O.) It may be several days after you have had that big night out and you still feel shattered then your doctor might give you that blood test that finally picks up your I.O.

Blood letting has gone out of fashion since the middle ages to treat most things but not I.O., infact it is the only way of treating it directly. This can happen in the form of a phlebotomy or venesection which are identical procedures to donating blood. When 500 mls (one pint) of blood is taken  with a regularity in proportion to the iron levels in your body over time, those nasty things that can happen to your liver, pancreas, heart and sex life can be completely avoided.

As always there are things you can do to help yourself manage I.O., avoiding alcohol,  going easy on  red meat consumption, raw seafood such as oysters are particularly hazardous, dark chocolate may not agree with you and taking iron or vitamin C supplements are out too. Vitamin C from fresh fruit is ok though.

Pretty unusual sounding disease isn’t it? I.O. can even set off metal detectors!, it is good for one thing though, it will make you a regular blood donor, it will make you a giving person even if you don’t want to be.